For Older Guys: How Do You See Gender Relations Today?

I'm curious, what do older men think about the status/health of younger male-female relationships today, be it via personal experience as an eye witness or some other medium. How does it compare to your day?

 

I don't like some of the things I see in public, how one gender treats the other.

It's a sign of the times, and when a gal tells you to "man up", then you need to find one worth manning up for.... The one who won't say ridiculous shit like that is the one worth your time.

The other one won't be yours long anyway.


I was in Walmart recently, and while looking at shoes a young couple next to me were having one of "those" convos...she was putting him in his place. We looked @ each other and I smiled and and said "good luck, man!".

I felt sorry for him.

 

Times have changed.. these changes have made a difference to people and relationships.

For so long, men have run the show, not so now, women can actually live alone. When I was a child, the only women that lived alone, were widows.
Divorce was unheard of, and virtually impossible for a woman to get.
Girls were taught all the ways to make a nice home at school, it was home economics.. now removed from the coriculum, condoms were only sold in men's barbers, do I need to go on?

You can't have a thread like this, that's so bloody minded and not mention that society has changed relationship's..

Scratch, women have had it like that for hundreds of years, you felt sorry for him? Omg! I was in a store last year and watched a woman have her arm twisted up her back, you should have heard the pop at it came out the socket! You should see the women and children at the group i attended who were beaten and raped because their men were in a " bad mood"

Relationships are different today.. because it's getting better for women..

 

Women do have more feedom nowadays than 30 or 40 years ago. But fundamentally I see little change in the younger people I know and their relationships. I see relationships where the male calls the shots and vica versa. Perhaps fewer women get imprisoned in relationships with a man who acts like a petty tyrant. Hard to say really. I'm sure that still goes on. Old and entrenched patterns like that are not easy to eliminate.

There are more single parents these days - not sure if that's a particuarly good thing when I look at some of the now 'mature' children of single parents, but it could just be that the ones I know are bad examples.

Makes me glad to be the age I am and happy to be single. The idea of having some attached person telling me what to do all the time is very far from appealing.

Of course, I'm only talking here about my own white British ethnic group. Among other communities there's still a much more old fashioned attitude in many cases. So we still see things like arranged marriages.
Also it seems that often the rhetoric about women's freedom doesn't match the actuality - I think women still have a long way to go before they get true equality.

 

It sounds like things are a bit different in UK, still old school...I think it changed here long before over there.

So basically both sexes need to straighten it out and try to be equal and not boss each other around, that's my belief. Always has been.

I know what I've been through, I understand where you're coming from too.

What I'm saying is everyone needs to tone the pace and attitude down and show true love to one another, instead of one-upmanship, on both sides.

Just because women had it differently before, is no excuse for them to abuse men now.

That would be like having the world turn at Germany and keep bombing them into oblivion because of what Adolf Shitler did 75+ years ago.

 

Quote..Just because women had it differently before, is no excuse for them to abuse men now. Unquote!

Do you see what your saying there?

It's not that I don't know or understand what your saying.. I think I might know you better that that.. but men need to do the biggest change.. and get over being controllers, that's history. Women are trying to be equal, just not allowing men to take control any more..but if a woman is seen to be in that chair, oh boy it's so wrong! He might have even liked that scratch

 

I've never been to the US but looking from a distance I don't think America is ahead of Europe on this at all.

In the UK we're on our second woman Prime Minister (neither particularly 'femminine' types of women, but nonetheless), Germany has Merkel. America has yet to have a woman in the top job.

 

Morrow- OK, I think I understand. This sounds like my mother talking, but-

Men need to just stop worrying about it and let the women lead. Period...


Understand though, that I get the impression that after so long in a marriage like that, the woman resents this way and divorces her "trained man" and marries an Alpha, and blames the ex for being a pussy. I myself have personally been there and experienced that.

Realize, that is the life I have lived. But hey, argue and believe what you want. I'm done discussing this as it is a sore spot that has made a very large problem in my life, as well as my child's. I don't take it lightly.

 

Yeah but when you were a child you didnt see how men interacted with other men, and all those older people that surrounded you would have been people in families in suburbia


Having to work wherever, no cctv, pretty much no OHS rules, no anti discrimination laws or policies at work, guys promoted, hired, fired based on how buddy buddy they were with the boss, hazing, punch ups

Bad behaviour, the same kind of attitude towards their subordinates at work that they show the wife when they come home, that kind of shit would have been rife in the workplace

You didnt see any of that

Divorced was unheard of? You only saw families in suburbia. You never saw all the areas of single guy labourers, unmarried women



https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/feb/11/marriage-rates-uk-data

Marriage rates in the UK took a dive after the early 80s, but before that, there werent as many people marrying as you think there were

1900, the life expectancy was 50 for females, just under 45 females marrying per 1000 single females per year, approx half that rate in 2005. One snapshot, thats only 4.5% in one given year


This graph shows the number of marriages, hasnt changed all that much



The marriage rate was higher in the 1970s than it was in the 1920s



There has always been a sizeable minority of the population that never get married, just that you never interacted with them when you were younger.

Almost impossible to get a divorce? Divorce rate was 5% a year in 1970

 

Well, I can tell you that being a father to a young teen daughter makes me pull my hair out sometimes. I fear that since she doesn't want to listen sometimes, she will go against my wishes when it comes to dating at some point. I've told her that guys wearing sagging pants are off limits. I can't get past the fact that when I was growing up, what my dad would do to me if he even saw me dressed like that. I wouldn't be alive! The point that I made to my daughter about that, is that if they don't have enough respect for themselves, how do I trust that they will have any respect for my daughter?

Example: I'm in a small store grabbing a few things, and a few people in front of me is a young man at the counter in sagging pants, who hollers out "get me some skittles nigga." I look to see who he's talking to and see this young woman walk up and hand him a pack of skittles.
I thought to myself "punk ass motherfucker. Anybody EVER talk to MY daughter that way will get LAID THE FUCK OUT!!

Find a strong, goal oriented man to date that respects you is what I tell her all the time. But do you think she will listen? Nooooooo, LOL! We'll see.
Pardon me for going on a rant.

 

My father did a runner after 20 years of marriage, for two main reasons:

1. My little brother had hit 15, and my father started to get very worried about what he'd end up doing to him

2. My father knew full well once both of us had finished high school, my mother was going to kick him out


No one really believes you'd have the balls to kick the ass of a 15 or 18 year old twice your size

 

I love the graph vanilla, thank you, being a family history geek, it shows the way people married around war time, sad to say, it also shows the dip in marriage after the wars, due to lack of men coming home.. so sad.
I came from a very large working class family, I remember my great grandparents, my children had great great grandparents, I've photographs of the generation get to gethers, I seen how the men worked and controlled their families, how it was passed on.. also seen the change in my own family, my mum was the boss.. I seen 1 divorce, and it was the man divorced the wife..
In the 70s, I tried to divorce, I was told not a chance.. for reasons I'm not going to say, but yes, the 80s started the change.. took another decade to be easy to divorce though..
UK is not a big place, so yes, I think that, the size of my family, my own marriage and divorce, I think I can say I seen it vanilla.

 

I think that idea of everyone was married was only a 1940s through to 1970s thing though.

Before 1900, everyone was like dirt poor, like EVERYONE, we didnt have the technology or infrastruture to handle big populations, 1st half of the 1900s a couple big wars to interuppt things.

A couple decades there post world war 2, where everyone settled down, but still werent communicating with each other enough for other ideas. And thats probably it, the Golden age of matrimony, 1945 to 1970.

I also think WW2 is where womens lib really started, they were forced to employ woman in jobs guys used to do, they low and behold, there is no real difference if a woman does such and such job, they even do some jobs better....then it just took a couple decades for the cbics then welding together armaments "well, hang on, then what do I need a man for?"


Fidelity is certainly a lot harder nowadays thanks to the internet and apps, dont see how we are ever going back to everybody vets married, divorce is unheard of